Seventeen motorists and four passengers died in the city in August; 1,599 and 1,869 were injured, respectively. Seventeen is by far the highest number of motorist fatalities in a single month since January 2012, when Streetsblog began compiling monthly NYPD data.

There were 16,729 motor vehicle crashes in the city last month.

Download August NYPD summons data here. Crash and summons data from prior months is available in multiple formats here.

After the jump: contributing factors for crashes resulting in injury and death.

Was just about to ping y’all that the new data was released last night. Here’s to hoping that the vastly expanded new NYC data portal (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/) will eventually include a clean, machine-readable version of this database…

Hart Noecker

We can’t really expect the cops to worry about stuff like this when they’re so busy stealing people’s bicycles – because, y’know, terrorism!

Anonymous

Note that 1,378 pedestrians and cyclists injured in a month is about two an hour–or the same number of violations per hour that Schwartz and Soffian claimed to have seen in their NYDN op-ed. They should really have been embarrassed to put that number out there . . .

And so long as I’m fighting old fights, I have to say I don’t understand why no one seemed bothered by Schwartz and Soffian’s claim that “fewer than one [pedestrian] a year [is] killed by a bike.” Zero people killed in the past four years (Stuart Gruskin was killed in April 2009) is quite a bit different than “fewer than one.”

Anonymous

It’s hard to know the exact rate for such an infrequent event accurately, and I think “fewer than one” is a fair enough description. I take it loosely to mean “somewhere between 0.1 and 1”, and I think you would agree that the “true rate” is likely to be in that range. If you just pick the last four years, it would be 0.25/year, for example.

Consider that even if the “true rate” were as high as 1.0/year, it is still not that unlikely to find three consecutive years with zero fatalities (the odds are around 5%, calculated using the Poisson distribution).

On the other hand, the claim that they only saw one or two drivers violating the law in an hour is laughable.

Opafiets

It seems that each month, as a percentage of total involvement, bicycling fatalities are quite low compared to pedestrians. EG, this month bicyclist fatalities were 1 in 524 while pedestrian was 12 in 867. A bicyclist involved in a crash is much less likely to be killed than a pedestrian (then again, those in cars are certainly safest with about 21 fatalities in 33,000 and as a percentage of total numbers bicyclists are far more likely to be involved than a pedestrian).

Anonymous

I think conventions of rounding suggest that “fewer than one” means .5 to .9 and thus think “a little more than zero” rather than “fewer than one” is more accurate. But English is not very accepting of that kind of phrasing.

Regardless, as rhetoric, it’s very misleading. In more than fifty months, no one has been killed in New York City by a person riding a bike. Given the clear downward plunge during that time in the number of pedestrians injured by cyclists every year–attested by multiple studies–I think there is reason to believe that we could be close to eliminating these kinds of deaths or of making them so rare that they’re summed up more accurately using phrases like “roughly once every five years.”

There’s reason to be cautious about this trend. And you have a much more robust mathematical justification for that than I could ever come up with. But I guess this was just part of my “with friends like these” response to that op-ed.

Driver

You have to take into account where they likely were when they only witnessed two driver violations an hour.

Already noted but just to emphasize, all the pedestrians were killed with motor vehicles, and even all the ones killed walking on the sidewalk were killed with motor vehicles operating on the sidewalk. None of the few pedestrians injured with bicycles on the sidewalk have died.

Al Cinamon

Well, doesn’t this put to rest the myth that slow drivers are dangerous? Driving slowly does not appear on the list!

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